This week snuck up on me and I don’t have a question and answer prepared, so I’m keeping it easy by sharing a few things I’ve been excited about. Is any of it explicitly about tattooing? No! I hope you like them anyway, and ask a question for a future Q+A here.
Reading:
🦋 Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City by Dianne Chisolm. I’m not far into this but already thrilled by the language contained in this writing: fossils, hauntings, phantasmagoria. I’m drawn more and more to geographic theories of abstract relationships, places, ways of being, and love the literary mapping that Chisolm is practicing. If anyone has any leads on a copy of the hard-to-find Queers in Space: Communities, Public Spaces, Sites of Resistance (Bay Press 1997) please please hit me up.
“Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The "gay village," "gay mecca," ""gai Paris," the "lesbian flaneur," the "lesbian boheme"--these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential.”
🦋 I just ordered a copy of the new release EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK COMMUNE, 2052–2072 by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. The book is a speculative oral history collection of a future New York Commune established in the 2050s after global war, famine, and economic crisis collapsed the world’s governments. So much of my work lately deals with imagination and futurity, and oral history is an exciting space to consider those things within. I can’t wait to read!
Listening to:
🦋 Death of an Artist podcast ~ Hosted by art historian and curator Helen Molesworth, this limited series covers the tragic death of artist Ana Mendieta and the art world’s response to her husband Carl Andre’s murder trial and acquittal. While I will never not find podcast advertising distasteful (“Covering true crime makes it hard to sleep at night. That’s why I’ve partnered with Casper Mattress to”), and the style aligns a bit too much with the standard true crime template for my taste, I appreciate that the host has some skin in the game. She spends quite a bit of the show unpacking the silence she encountered in reporting the story, and asks challenging questions about the art world’s desire to separate the art from the artist.
[Image: Strafe performing onstage, wearing dark sunglasses, long gloves, holding a guitar, and singing with mouth open into a mic.]
🦋 Strafe- Set it Off ~ I was walking down Nostrand Ave on one of this week’s beautiful clear fall days and a vendor was blasting this. It took me back to rollerskating at my hometown’s roller rink as a kid, and reminded me that this song is just solid gold all around. I can’t stop listening to it. When looking up more about Strafe, I learned that Steven W. Standard is also a visual artist with his own shop of clothing designs on Atlantic Ave (Hard Soul Boutique).
[Image: “luscious” design t-shirt by Steven W. Standard.]
🦋 This 2015 conversation between Fred Moten and Stefano Harney via the Poetry Project.
Watching:
🦋 The Watcher on Netflix ~ based on this absolutely compelling article in the Cut, the still-unsolved case is a haunting one. Read the story first. The series invents some questionable plot inclusions to extend the story into eight episodes, but Jennifer Coolidge and Noma Dumezweni make it all worth watching.
🦋 Seeing:
Domesticanx at El Museo ~ from their site: “DOMESTICANX brings together seven intergenerational artists whose practices address the private sphere through works related to healing, spirituality, decoration, and the home. The show is inspired by the concept of “domesticana,” first theorized by artist, scholar, and critic Amalia Mesa-Bains in the 1990s. Proposed as a Chicana feminist response to the male-dominated “rasquachismo,” domesticana shifts the defiant and expressive inventiveness of rasquache culture to the specific experience of working-class women. Drawing from Mesa-Bains’s own acknowledgement that all “terminologies must remain porous, sensibilities never completely named, and categories shattered,” DOMESTICANX expands the artists’s original Chicana and feminist theory through the sense of contemporary Latinx intersectionality.”
🦋 Mutual aid and community support:
My friend Angela Maria (@catthroat) a is building a Seattle-based Filipino community library, hosted by Flower Flower CID. Round out the end of Filipin@/x history month by supporting this initiative by donating funds and books to create this center for cultural knowledge!
Venmo @angiewhy or PayPal angelamariatattoos@gmail.com